Out On More Than The Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week By The Blog's Second-Favorite Canadian)

I would like to register a complaint with the God Of Blogs. It is simply not fair to the rest of us to hand as big a fish in as small a barrel as Mayor Bob Filner to Tbogg in that worthy'shome fking town. Not fair at all.

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Science was a little nuttier back in the day than it is now. At a conference this week in the UK, two researchers from Mexico presented a paper in which they explored the theory, popular among scientists in the 18th century in the Spanish provinces of the New World, that an overconsumption of chocolate was the cause of what the scientists referred to as "hysteria" among women. Nuns were said to be particularly chocolate-silly. According to the paper presented this week in Manchester:

Bartolache believed that chocolate was responsible for the disease of hysteria, which he claimed affected 60% of lay women and 80% of nuns in the cities of Mexico and Puebla with which he was familiar (although very tight clothes and going to bed late and getting up late were other supposed causes). In the pre-Hispanic society of the 1800s, cacao boomed in popularity and could be served hot or cold for medicinal or pleasure purposes.

Nuns in particular enjoyed a life of relative luxury especially where chocolate was concerned, and could consume it in liberal quantities no matter what the price of it, since convents at that time had amassed great wealth. They would drink the chocolate with their servants in private quarters. However, an Archbishop, Francisco de Lorenzana, was tasked with overseeing what is now Mexico and brought in new regulations forcing the nuns to eat, live and dress communally.

Hence nuns were no longer allowed to have private servants or make their own chocolate and had to have their chocolate in the general refectory. As a result their intake was greatly diminished. The nuns did not like these new arrangements, and were said to be prone to attacks of hysteria. The authors say: "Was the decrease in consumption of this aphrodisiac substance responsible for the hysterical attacks that supposedly afflicted them? Or were Bartolache's and other's accusations of the prevalence of hysteria amongst religious women just another affront to the female character by a male dominated society?"

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I know which way I'm betting, although I admit that I am sorry that Ken Russell died before he had a chance to make a movie about chocolate-maddened nuns.

More intriguing from that same conference was a paper exploring whether monkeys who'd travelled in space were somehow more human after they returned.It turns out that it was all because their human handlers were schmucks, which could have been predicted.

Using the approach of "animal biography" from animal studies, I attend to the different ways in which each monkey was remade into an unwilling celebrity representative for American space exploration, and how connections to cold war science, technology, medicine, and the military, shifted human regard for the monkeys from non-specific human models, to models of specific humans. I also pay special attention to how Able's controversial death resulted in bitter friction between Army and Navy doctors over best practices. Additionally, this paper brings into focus how these specific acts of animal person-making reveal deep-seated assumptions about human gender roles during the cold war, and more generally, reflects critically on how and why animals used in high-profile, medical experiments often come to be regarded as "more human" afterward.

And I admit that I am sorry that Rod Serling died before he could write the Twilight Zone episode in which the monkeys take their horrible -- but completely justified -- revenge.

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Here's a video of the newest Great Lake, which those clever dicks behind the Great Climate Change Hoax used to call the North Pole. I look forward to next Christmas when Santa's sleigh is depicted with pontoons. Also, too, the permafrost in Antarctica is a lot less perma than it once was. Somebody ought to think about doing something about this.

The manager also astutely pointed out, "You can't put a coin in a garter belt."

You could outfit them all with those little change-makers that streetcar conductors used to use, but that would be a bit ungainly, I'm thinking.

I am hoping the scoop-gone-wrong plot on The Newsroom accelerates this week, because the romantic arcs are getting worse by the minute. (Jim Harper is perhaps the singularly most hapless male character in the history of western drama. He seems to be the only man subjected to Sorkin's misogyny.) I also think they're setting us up to kill off Gary Cooper in Africa. And, am I wrong, or is the whole thing a lot more gloomy than last year was? Time to start feeding Charlie more bourbon.

So here's the deal. I'm taking next week off. The blog will feature Very Special Episodes by several guest stars. Colonel Bob will be stopping by with some non-Civil War observations, and some of the others will be dustier than normal, if you know what I mean. I'll drop in if something important happens. If not, I'll see y'all on August 5. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. And don't torment the substitute teachers. I'll be getting regular reports.

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